It's an old school desk, probably form about 1920. The earlier ones were more ornate with filigree iron works. Yours looks like its' been refinished or at least had the marks sanded out, and the lack of rust is a good thing. They came in different sizes for the different grades....the smallest are the most desirable. Not worth much...if you can get $35 youa re doing well....but I have seen some with ornate sides sell for about $65. I think they are neat....I have 3 in my basement left from when my kids would play school....many many years ago!\ You will have to google the maker and see what you find. Linda C

In my hometown in Ohio the current Jr. High School, which was the previous High School was built in 1910. During the construction of that building my Grandfather got up every morning and did his chores at the farm, then hitched 4 draft horses to a large box wagon and went to the sandbank where he hand loaded 2 tons of sand and hauled it 9 miles to the construction site, hand unloaded the wagon, then drove the wagon home in time to do evening chores in the barn for the outrageous sum of $9 a load including the cost of the sand, transportation and labor. The building is 4 stories high and has 32 classrooms with 36 of those desks in each classroom, all still in use today with the exception of two classrooms where they took the seats out, removed the divider wall and opened it up as a study hall. They purchased modern one arm desk chairs for the study hall, but kept all the old desks for spare parts to maintain the original seating. In the mid 80's I moved to Massachusetts and took a job as a maintenance tech in a local municipal school system. In that school system we had one high school, a middle school and 5 elementary schools. The middle school and one elementary school still had those old desks until 1988, when we finally took them out. In both the school in my hometown and the schools were I worked the desks were all firmly bolted to the floor. From my personal experience there were a number of different styles and configurations. Fundamentally those seats were made in three sizes, small for grades 1-3, medium for grades 4-6 and a standard or full size for grades 7-12. Most of the desks had the fold down seat on the front, which provided seating for the desk in front of it, but they also made some that had no fold down seat. The desk without a seat was installed at the head of the row because it would not have a desk in front of it. While the normal seat has two cast iron frames, there was a variation where they used three frames and attached two desks side by side to make a double row of seating, one frame on each side and a common frame in the center of the two adjoining desks. Each classroom was typically arranged with 4 rows of 9 seats front to back to make a total of 36 desks per classroom. Generally they all had a wooden desktop made of Maple or Oak and an open shelf underneath for books and storage, although there were some full size desks that had a hinged top and a fully enclosed book storage under the desktop. All three sizes have the 4" wide flat section at the top of the writing area with a groove to hold a pencil but generally only the full size desks had the hole for an inkwell. (The reasoning was that students did not begin writing with ink pens until they reached Jr. High.) Although they had long since removed the ink wells, none the less we still had hundreds of the ink wells in stock in the maintenance stock room and we would give them to the art teacher as needed so the students could use them to hold india ink when they were using speedball pens to do pen & ink drawings, but i suspect even the old speedball pens have long since given way to fine point felt tip pens. (I majored in art in J.H. & H.S. and I still keep a few of the inkwells and some crow quill and speedball pens which i use as a hobby). I can fondly remember my school days sitting in those old seats and at the end of the period, when the bell rang and you were dismissed, you were required to stand, then raise your seat before leaving the classroom. Anyone failing to raise the seat would receive 3 nights detention. On a side note, in the early 60's Mattel toy company came out with what they called "Greenie Stickem Caps" which were caps for our cap pistols. The cap pistols had plastic bullets and the caps were precut circular caps with a pressure sensitive adhesive backing that you applied to the head of the bullet before loading in your cap pistol. We used to take those caps to school and stick them on the frame of the fold down seats so when a student flipped the seat down it would explode the cap and scare everybody. Probably if a student did that today they would be arrested as a terrorist.....LOL.

Sinking....drowning....down down you go.....

And now I'm more convinced than ever that the lovely cast iron legs bolted to the floor that supported oak desks with tilted lids and with cut outs for inkwells served a greater good than I ever thought they did... . (Penmanship mattered then). And following that there were the Mission inspired chairs and desks... and the cool, modernist inspired "boomerang" chairs and moulded chairs... Somehow, strangely enough, my parents, my brother, and I learned to read, write, and cypher sitting on or behind any one of those mentioned above. Go figure!